How to take advantage of 5Ghz wireless band

archer_oldie

01-01-2015

I just had BT Infinity 2 installed and I expected a big difference between that and the old broadband in respect to wirelsss speed but I haven't really.

I understand that with the BT home Hub 5 using its 5Ghz band is faster thn the 2.4Ghz band. But when I try to change the admin settings to use the 5ghz band I get this message.

In order to benefit from the higher rates offered by 802.11 b/g/n (up to 300Mb/s) mode requires that all wireless devices in range of your hub are compatible with "40MHz channel" operation.

Now I can see from te home network picture that my wife's Ipad is on the 5Ghz band but my laptop is on the 2.4Ghz band. My laptop is a Dell studio 1745.

Is there anything I can do to make my wirelss faster. Thanks all.

victorslot

02-01-2015

Does your Dell have a wifi card capable of receiving a 5Ghz signal? Not all laptops have this capability and older/cheaper ones certainly won't have the dualband card fitted.

If you don't have a 5Ghz card already fitted your options are to either get one fitted or disable the internal wifi card and use a 5Ghz USB dongle.

lonewaller

02-01-2015

If you dig through these forums I seem to remember people talking about setting up separate SSID's for the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands - could this help ?

Brian

chrisjr

02-01-2015

Originally Posted by lonewaller:
“If you dig through these forums I seem to remember people talking about setting up separate SSID's for the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands - could this help ?

Brian”

It would certainly help identify which band you are using.

Though I'm seeing conflicting results searching on the model the OP has provided. Some results suggest the WiFi card in the laptop is only 802.11g at best and others say it could do 802.11n. Though it seems the age of the laptop may be significant, the 802.11g results do seem to be older.

But if it does have 802.11g only then you are not going to see much above 20-25Mb/s whatever band you manage to persuade it to use as that is the limit with 802.11g. Hopefully though it does have 802.11n.

But even so I've not seen anything so far to say if it can do 5GHz or is only 2.4GHz.

The Sack

03-01-2015

I use a separate SSID on my HH5 and placed this WiFi card in my PC http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-W.../dp/B007GMPZ0A No good for a laptop but at least you can see the benefit of a n card and different SSID

This is what i get on 2.4GHz http://www.speedtest.net/result/4030200853.png

This is what i get on 5Ghz http://www.speedtest.net/result/4030203640.png